My second Blogging Portfolio!

Hello dear followers! I’m happy to introduce to you the fabulous second blog portfolio that you’re about to see. As you may or may not have noticed, all article titles are song titles, so feel free to check those out as well. Please take a few moments to read my little introductions to each link, and please enjoy the reading! Merry Christmas!

1.                  Coverage-

I’m not a girl, not yet a woman

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/10/im-not-girl-not-yet-woman.html

This blog is about the article ‘Talking Back’ from Bell Hooks. The article deals with the struggle between being who you want to be and being who you are. I talked about the fact that the narrator says that she was never allowed to express her opinion, which I related to the ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood. Offred was easy to relate to the text because she was oppressed as well. Freedom of speech is the main focus of this blog.

Blondie one way or another

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/blondie-one-way-or-another.html

‘Blondie one way or another’ is about the article ‘Klaus Barbie, and other dolls I’d like to see’ by Susan Jane Gilman, which is a very feminist article. I talked about the way the author criticizes the Barbie doll, which many of us used to love so much. A childhood without a Barbie, is like a Wienerschnitzel without fries, at least I thought so. Again, this is a feminist article that I related to ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’. In a second part of my blog entry, I wrote about the article ‘Teen Mags: How to Get a Guy, Drop 20 Pounds and Lose Your Self-Esteem’ by Anastasia Higginbotham which was very similar to the first article, only referring to teen magazines instead of Barbie dolls.

You’re beautiful

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/youre-beautiful.html

This entry is about the article ‘The Beauty Myth’ by Naomie Wolp. The dilemma of why-am-I-not-pretty-enough is discussed in this blog entry, and I criticized the way women care too much about their appearances. The article focuses on the fact that women always look for some problem to deal with (like their physical appearance) because they don’t have to worry about fighting for their rights anymore. All women out there should enjoy reading this, because I’m sure that everyone can easily relate to it. Ladies, don’t be shy!

I don’t need a man

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-dont-need-man.html

‘I don’t need a man’ is an entry about the feminist article ‘Blame it on Feminism’ by Susan Faludi. This article wrapped up all the ideas implied in the previous entries, and once again it says how miserable the women are nowadays. The focus in this article was that women are suppressed by men, which clearly reflects the feminist motifs in ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’.

What is love? Baby, don’t hurt me, no more.

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-is-love-baby-dont-hurt-me-no-more.html

I’m going to be honest with you; I really like this blog entry. It’s an informal commentary about a passage in the book ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’, which focuses on love. The commander and Offred have a conversation about falling in love. Offred shows in a negative tone how she feels about the downward motion of love. I discussed the tone, diction and imagery in the passage. In the extract, Offred compares love to religion, shown through the ironic tone. Diction portrays her struggle and instability, and imagery suggests that love is like a fall. Enjoy!

Trying to find the magic, trying to write a classic

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/trying-to-find-magic-trying-to-write.html

‘Trying to find the magic, trying to write a classic’ talks about the chapter Narrating in the book How Fiction Works by James Wood. How Fiction Works describes the narrating devices a good narrator should be aware of. I related this to theatrical analysis, On Language by Zamyatin, The Road by McCarthy and We by Zamyatin. It’s very focused on language itself and not so much on content, which makes this discussed article different from the others.

Country roads take me home

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/country-roads-take-me-home.html

‘Country roads take me home’ focuses on The Road written by McCarthy. I discussed the main focuses of the book, and I talked about what it was that made it so special to read it. This is a great book about relationships, and such as many other dystopian books, it warns us about our behavior. It was a pleasure reading and writing about this book, and I think that anyone who hasn’t read the book should definitely do so because it is worth every minute of your time!

2. Depth- this blog shows a depth of discussion as well as further research or analysis using secondary sources (linked or quoted)

Trying to find the magic, trying to write a classic

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/trying-to-find-magic-trying-to-write.html

This blog entry turned out to have to most researched discussion, since it uses secondary sources to support the analysis. Writing this blog, I took the time to think about relating readings or methods that I had thought of before. Since I personally couldn’t relate to the article ‘How Fiction Works’, it forced me to think outside of the box to relate it to something that I could make personal (like the theatrical analysis).

2.                  Interaction- this is where you show breadth by reading peers posts, linking someone else's post to your own, and addressing what they've said.

Country Roads Take Me Home

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/country-roads-take-me-home.html

I modified this blog to add my reflection on Pooja’s blog on the same topic: The Road. She helped me getting another perspective on the book since I was dazzled by the emotions the book evoked in me.

3.                  Discussion- this post generates such interest (or conflict) that a discussion amongst your peers emerge.

What is Love? Baby, don’t hurt me, no more.

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-is-love-baby-dont-hurt-me-no-more.html

This blog seemed to be the most ‘successful’ of my blogs, engaging a small but in depth discussion between Sabrina, Ms. Morgan, Pooja and I. I developed and defended my ideas thanks to my interested peers.

4.                  Xenoblogging-

Just your average Samantha Jones

http://poojasivhlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/just-your-average-samantha-jones.html

This is a link to Pooja’s blog ‘Just your average Samantha Jones where she and I started a discussion about the article ‘Blame it on feminism’. We helped each other develop our ideas on her blog, as well as mine (http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-dont-need-man.html ).

5.                  Wildcard

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart

http://jorina-hlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/12/last-christmas-i-gave-you-my-heart.html

This is a poem that I recently wrote when I was sad about spending Christmas away from my family and friends in Europe. I used a format that I got to know in ninth grade where my French teacher assessed us to write up all our likes and dislikes, which I really enjoyed doing.

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart

I like it when the first snowflakes melt in my open mouth and I’m not able to open my eyes because they’re covered with the white wet flakes

I like the smell of the Christmas tree’s needles when it stands in the living room for the very first time

I like to sit in church on Christmas Eve singing Christmas carols, always checking that someone else is singing louder than myself

I like the sound of my feet walking in the crunchy snow, sliding and slipping

I like to walk underneath the snow-loaded trees feeling so small and overwhelmed

I like the moment when you walk into that candle-lighted room, the smell of candles in the air, asking myself what Santa Claus might have brought me

I like to see if my pile of presents is the tallest

I like to decorate the tree with decorations that I made ten years ago

I like the smell of self-made cookies baking in the oven

I like walking on the icy road, slipping and falling just to end up sitting on the ground laughing by myself

I like to hold a cup of hot chocolate when it’s freezing outside and all you can see looking through the window is a wild rush of snowflakes racing to the ground

I like eating my favorite meal before opening the presents even though it used to be hard to concentrate on food when I thought that Santa might still be in the house

I like running through the magazines looking for the perfect present for all my loved ones

I like pretending for a while that everything is going to be okay.

I love the Christmas season.

I don’t like when it’s too hot for my Christmas sweater on Christmas Eve

I don’t like when the only snow you see is on TV

I don’t like when the place that feels the most like Christmas, is the mall

I don’t like to sit in a sticky church with fans on all sides

I don’t like to feel bad about eating too much in Christmas season

I don’t like to sit by a pool thinking about rolling in the snow

I don’t like to look at the smallest Christmas tree I’ve ever seen just to find out that it’s made out of plastic

I don’t like to miss so many people knowing that they’re so far away

I don’t like to get on a plane the day after Christmas, knowing that it’s not taking me home

I don’t like to realize that life isn’t always the way I want it to be.

I hate not being home for Christmas.

Country Roads Take Me Home

“You have to carry the fire.

I don’t know how to.

Yes you do.

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I don’t know where it is;

Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.”

The Road was an inspiring book to me, to a point that I teared up reading the last few pages of it. The novel is about the lives of a man and his son, trying to get to the sea where it’s warmer. It shows the consequences of a nuclear war, the world is dark and cold and cannibalism took over humanity. The book is very simply written with short staccato sentences, which makes it very easy to read. At the beginning the narrative structure had me lost and confused to a point that I asked myself: Why does everyone love this book so much? It’s after a quarter of the book that you get a glimpse at the true beauty of it. Simple sentences go from being annoying and misleading to flowingly easy to read. I was grasped by the story and felt like if I put the book down, someone’s going to die. I love these experiences, these bonds you form with a book and its story, and The Road perfectly made this possible.

The main focus of this book is the deep and trusting relationship between the father and the boy. The father has been the only person taking care of the boy since his mother decided to take her life, because she thought that they were just running away from death with no goal at all. The boy, being young and thin, trusts his father with all his heart. They are each other’s world entirely. A child in normal circumstances would probably have rebelled after few weeks of travelling in the frosty cold without hardly any food at all, but that’s when the relationship between the two makes a difference: The boy believes his father when he says that in the south it will be warm. Even after reaching the coast (grey water instead of blue, no ‘good’ people reunited like he hoped, no child to play with and a father that has a bad cough) the trust in his father stays alive.

The belief that keeps them alive is that they’re carrying the fire (see quote above). I thought that The Road was a unique book, written in a style I’d never seen before, and that’s what makes it special. I wish that there was a another ending to it though, just because it is so uncertain.

After reading about Pooja's ideas in her blog http://poojasivhlenglish.blogspot.com/2010/11/dystopian-or-post-apocalyptic-review-on.html about The Road, I was impressed by her arguments about the missing plot of the novel. Looking back I think that I was impressed by the fact that the end moved me so much, ignoring that all the same things had been happening over and over again in a different context. I enjoyed reading her blog for this exact reason: It might have changed my mind about the book. However, I think that there is no doubt that The Road is an outstanding novel, striking through by being different.

Trying to find the magic, Trying to write a classic

“Any form of authorial writing where the narrator sets himself up as stagehand and director and judge and executor in text, I find somehow unacceptable” writes James Wood in the chapter Narrating of his novel How Fiction Works.

Isn’t it true that everyone hates a book where the narrator knows everything, acts like he/she’s God and judges the story along the way, commenting all actions of every character? That is what the author is trying to say and I agree with him. A narrator like this reveals too much and there is no ‘reading between the lines’. By nature we are repulsed by a person that acts like he’s God. In the Road we find some very interesting narration. The narrator is omniscient (third person) but at the same time we don’t get the feeling that he knows much. It’s written in the perspective of someone who just stands next to them watching what they do, hearing what they say, as well as knowing the thoughts of the man. An astonishing fact is that the man and the boy are never called by their names. The narrator never gives us background about the characters, only through the father’s thoughts. Wood suggests that a third person is reliable (omniscience) and a first person narrator is unreliable because he knows less about himself than the reader does. However he feels like the perfect narrator is someone who knows what the rules are and knows the answers to certain questions, this I find is a difficult thing to do but I think that the narrator in the Road did an amazing job achieving this. There is so much suspense and mystery only due to the fact that the narrator doesn’t know too much.

James Wood makes different statements throughout his piece of text about reliable and unreliable narration as well as omniscience, coming to the conclusion that omniscience does not exist. He goes on and analyzes narration of many different authors in depth which to me ruins a good book when you know all of this because you learn to look more closely at a text instead of just enjoying or disliking it. This realization reminded me a lot of theatrical analysis. When you learn about all the details that make a good actor, a good speech or a good setting you pay so much attention to these small details that you forget to just enjoy the play. When you’ve studied theater or English for a long time, I think it might be possible to just unconsciously realizing the details while loving a good theater performance or relaxing while reading a good book. To get to this point, is another challenge I have to overcome.

All the literary features such as irony that are discussed reminded me of the text On Language by Zamyatin that I read a few months ago. Both texts are very helpful when used for a deeper understanding of a text such as the Road and We by Zamyatin. Even though I prefer reading about people and their stories instead of reading about narration and literary features, this text is an immense help while one is trying to understand a text or a novel in detail.

What is Love? Baby don't hurt me, no more.

The extract from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale portrays Offred’s notion of love. Through instability in tone she conveys the two-sided face of love, while diction and imagery show her feelings towards love and men.

The ironic tone in this extract shows the relationship Offred makes between love and religion. She says that she ‘believed in it’, the past tense indicating that she no longer does. The extract states that God is love, but that they reversed it and love, like heaven, was always around the corner. The tone implicated here is almost sarcastic, indicating that she can’t believe that she once fell for that because she was let down and she had to realize that love, like God does no good. The fact that it was ‘always around the corner’ brings a negative tone to it, if not boredom. She writes ‘love’ with a capital L, like ‘God’.  Love is comfort, God gives you comfort but at the same time it is hard to remember when it’s over, like pain. This idea is one of the main ideas in this extract. She mentions that sometimes she would look at a man one day and think I loved you. This reminded me of her hope that’s lost because she doesn’t believe in God, and neither does she believe in Love. Her love is gone.

The chosen diction portrays Offred’s instability and struggle with her own feelings. The first paragraph shows repetition of the words ‘I don’t’ and ‘I could’ and then ‘so far’. Even in these few lines there is a mood change going on. First she says that she doesn’t want to tell the story, then she says that she doesn’t have to (twice) and she considers her possibilities by saying what she could do, and the words so far show how she’s losing hope. This loss of hope is to be seen in the next line with the words “Why fight? That will never do”. Speaking of love, Offred says that it was so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. She describes her positive and adventurous feelings towards it, but then it the last paragraph she talks about the man next to her, sharing her love, with very negative diction using words like shadow, darker and cavernous, representing her doubts. The last sentence of this extract is a question: What if he doesn’t love me? That shows how insecure a woman gets when she falls in love. In that paragraph the narrator talks about a man, showing that women are practically lost without men and love. This simple question shows her instability and her reliance on men. What does a woman do when he doesn’t love her?

The third and last devices Atwood uses in this extract is imagery even though it’s closely related to diction, it shows us a whole other side of Offred’s feelings towards love by suggesting that love is like a fall. In this extract much imagery is considered to describe love. Love is pain, love is heaven (always around the corner), love is a fall. From these three comparisons, the last one is the most important to Offred. Through the extract we see a pattern of repetition of the verb falling. Falling in love, falling into it, I fell for him, falling women, still falling. To her, love is a downward motion. It’s great when you’re on top of the hill, up so high looking down at the sky, but then when she starts to fall in love, she seems to scream don’t let me fall. Love is like flying, but since you have to come back on earth eventually, it hurts when you hit the ground. Offred was let down by love.

This extract of the Handmaid’s Tale is one of the best to portray Offred’s feelings for love. Through the book we can see her trying to hang on to those memories she has with her lost husband, but we see eventually that there weren’t just good sides to that marriage and that she felt suppressed sometimes by him in a way that she didn’t allow herself to ask or say the things she wanted to.

I don't need a man

The article ‘Blame it on feminism’ by Susan Faludi sums up the main ideas of the previous articles I blogged on. It says as well that women today look for something else to worry about, since they don’t have to fight for their rights anymore. Women these days have more power than ever, but still they aren’t happy. Women might be free and equal now, but they’ve never been this miserable. Working women suffer from too much stress, which sometimes leads to infertility, and single women suffer from the lack of a man. This can be referred to one of the previous articles about the teen mags. They gain their money by talking about what every single woman wants to know: How to get the perfect man? How to know if he’s the one?

This behavior can lead to eating disorders, hair loss, bad nerves, alcoholism and even heart attacks. It seems like women need some problem they can think of, some problem that they have to overcome. And if the problem is not a war or a lack of rights, why can’t it be a man?

The article focuses on the fact that women are suppressed by men and that it isn’t the women’s fault. This strongly relates to the book ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ where women are objects to conceive children. They’re like a machine, not human anymore. The women have lost their right to control their actions and bodies. When impregnated, their body is used like an ice machine, just that instead of producing ice, it produces a child. Once the child is born, it is given to the Commander’s life, a woman with an higher status.

The article also states that the women still don’t have the same rights as men, at least not at work. The U.S government still doesn’t give a family-leave and child care programs for working mothers. On the other side this is just a small aspect in the rights and equalization of women. If this is all the women have to worry about, then why can’t they be happy, might say a woman that lived in the years where women completely suppressed by men. Surveys indicate that women still don’t feel liberated, regardless from their rights. Women still think that they are discriminated at work.  This myth of men being stronger and better at everything (apart from cooking maybe), still isn’t worn out. Some men still believe that women belong in the kitchen and that they are incompetent in various jobs that involve physical work.

You're beautiful

The feminist article ‘The Beauty Myth’ by Naomi Wolp, talks about the never ending discussion of beauty. Women nowadays have gained their legal and reproductive rights, pursued higher education, entered the trades and the professions, and overturned ancient and revered beliefs about their social role. Now they look for other problems, like their physical appearance. Their bodies, faces, hair and clothes become all that matters to them, because these aspects are what define them and let them stand out in society. The need to stand out comes from our long lasting history of women that didn’t have the same rights of men, or women in different classes. Superiority can only be expressed through beauty, wealth or intelligence. Of these three factors beauty is the one thing that everyone can see at first sight. It’s like an etiquette. Prove for this is the fact that the number of eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing medical specialty. It matters to us women how we feel physically, how we feel in our own skin. That’s an important factor for a healthy life even though eating disorders and plastic surgery aren’t the solution to the problem. A healthy lifestyle would be sufficient.  At once, the diet and skin care industries became the new cultural censors of women’s intellectual space. Going back in history, you can find several times at when there were similar behaviors. Sometimes beauty portrayed fertility and women were resources that men had appropriated for themselves. At other times in different places, the ideal woman had a fat vulva and droopy breasts. Therefore there can’t be a universal beauty.

Women should be treated equally regardless from how they look like. As long as one looks healthy, she’s beautiful. There is no definition of beautiful, no matter how hard we try to find one. Women in our society go with the beauty trends, as long as the trend changes, then they have to change again if they’re truly committed. ‘Aller avec la mode’ would say a French person. Beauty that can be created by clothes or a fake nose, isn’t beauty. One might perceive someone as beautiful while someone else would say they’re ugly. The myth of beauty is an unstable concept and it always has been.

Blondie one way or another

The article ‘Klaus Barbie, and other dolls I’d like to see’ by Susan Jane Gilman is a very feminist article that reminded me of the ‘Handmaid’s tale’ in some ways. The article was very harshly written, criticizing Barbie dolls. She openly writes that she hates Barbie and all the ideals that are associated with it. Barbie is a threat to young girl because they portray the ‘perfect girl’. Blond, blue eyes, tall, skinny, big breasts, shiny clothes. Then it gets dangerously close to Hitler’s ideals. The Barbies ‘instill in legions of little girls a preference for whiteness, for blond hair, blue eyes and delicate features, perched eternally and submissively in high heels’. One of the main focuses of this article was that Barbies discriminate all urban girls like black, Jewish, Latino girls etc. The author describes the situation of a young girl that wasn’t good enough to be a bride, a model or a princess because she didn’t look like Barbie. Barbie is the only toy that in the Western world that human beings actively try to mimic, she says, and I agree with that. Nowadays at our age you still see a lot of girls that dye their hair blond, and go on diets to look thinner. It’s impressive what kind of impact Barbie had on young girls, considering that teenagers still behave the same way. I’m not sure if I agree with the fact that Barbies are achieving what Hitler failed to do in the third Reich; I think that’s a little exaggerated. Barbies might have been all blondes in the past, but nowadays there are red heads, brown heads, flat feet, legs that are able to spread apart and a accessorized belly that is able to carry a baby (hence the Barbie isn’t skinny anymore). On top of that you have to consider that the producers and manufactures of Barbie industries are trying their best to make money, so why would they design a Barbie that overlaps fat and that has multiple pimples on her face? Nobody would buy that Barbie for their child, as harsh as it sounds.  I wouldn’t consider a Barbie looking like that fat but she surely wouldn’t look healthy, and every mother wants their child to be healthy.

The article ‘Teen Mags: How to Get a Guy, Drop 20 Pounds and Lose Your Self-Esteem’ by Anastasia Higginbotham, has a similar point of view. Teen magazines, it says, influence girls in their unstable years of puberty to care more about boys, lipgloss and weight than any other things. The magazines remind the girls everyday that if you’d like a boyfriend, you should be skinny. Just like the previous article, it critiques blondes: “the ideal girl is evidenced by the cover models: white, usually blond, and invariably skinny”, and this I don’t approve on.  It’s not like a girl has to be blonde to be pretty, and in my opinion it is unfair to always associate blondes with prostitutes, blue eyes, skinniness and above all stupidness. If everyone wanted to have blond hair, then why would there be so many jokes about blondes?

I'm not a girl, not yet a woman

The article ‘Talking Back’ from Bell Hooks was very inspiring to read. It dealt with the freedom of speech of black women. The author talks about her own experiences as a suppressed girl that wasn’t allowed to talk back. Even in her young years she was fascinated by the vivid discussions the women around her used to have. She was never free to participate in these talks unless she wanted to be punished. The article deals with the struggle between being who you want to be and being who you are. Bell Hooks tells us about her path of becoming a writer. It wasn’t easy and some of experiences strongly relate to the ‘Handmaid’s tale’.

Having an opinion was forbidden in both stories, saying what you think was a crime. The black women have similar rights as the handmaids in Handmaid’s Tale. Bell Hook’s voice had been suppressed at a young age, and Offred in Handmaid’s tale can’t even speak to the people she’s living with, without fearing that she might be caught and punished. The article says: ‘safety and sanity were to be sacrificed if I was to experience defiant speech’, showing at what point people tried to shut her mouth. When Bell Hooks did talk, it was empowering to her just like Offred feels liberated when she talks to Olfgen for the first time on their shopping tours.

There are little details in the article that reminded me a lot of the Handmaid’s tale. In ‘Talking Back’ it says that talking means disagreeing even if you’re just expressing an opinion. It was impossible for Offred to ‘talk back’. It wasn’t her right to express her opinion and feelings. Every act of rebellion would end in a painful torture sessions. She also says that if she had been a boy, she might have been allowed to talk. Even in Handmaid’s tale it was preferable to be a boy because at least you wouldn’t get raped once a month. Bell Hooks also mentioned that she used to hide her writings under her bed, in pillow stuffings among faded underwear. This doesn’t exactly happen like this in the Handmaid’s tale but even Offred hid everything she wrote since it was forbidden to women to write.

The article Sins of Silence also reminds me of the Handmaid’s tale. Mai Kao Thao talks about her childhood and her relationship with her mother. Her mother told her to be a good, obedient woman, and smile silently as she swallows the bitterness that others give her. She told her that silence is power, that she had to be wordless, humble, obedient. A perfect Hmong woman. Just as Offred she got punished with harsh reprimands and scorching displeasure whenever she talked back of offered an opinion, and so she was silent. Emotionless. On the other side, just like Offred, she was filled with anger, dissatisfaction and anxiety, and above all emptiness. Her silence had killed her Self. She also suppressed her ideas of independence, as Offred doesn’t believe that there is a way out, that there is any way to escape. Hope for women in a regime like such, isn’t evident. I hope that things change for the better for the women that are still living this hell of a silent world.

My first Blogging Portfolio!

Welcome to my first Blogging Portfolio! The first couple months of IB HL English have been hard and challenging, but I am happy to present to you the best outcomes of these tough weeks. Long nights of reading, annotating and finally blogging, have proven themselves to be successful. Here by I'm showing you in 6 different categories my thoughts, ideas and reactions to different matters. Please take a few moments to read my introductions to my posts and comments on my peer’s blogs. I hope you enjoy reading through my posts, and you have some feedback to give me afterwards.

Coverage:
 - Nobody loves me, but my mother

This blog entry relates very well to the text on the North Korean concentration camp that I read about. I made good connections between the article, my own life and the life in 1984. I believe that I expressed my opinion on the subject fairly well, and the subject really interested me and I enjoyed talking about it. Saumya commented on my blog post, and I replied to her comment on her blog, where she discusses the same subject in one of her blog entries. More information on that discussion will be posted below.


Depth:
Do you believe in magic?

This entry of mine is the best one in my opinion since I state a lot of examples and I really go deep in terms of research and personal thoughts. I reference two different books (Harry Potter and Twilight) and I also make a connection to Brecht. I focused on why do we relate/read a certain novel? What makes us read a story and enjoy it?


Interaction:


Lack of Lightening

This post on Saumya’s blog shows well my ability to react to someone else’s ideas. Saumya and I had an interesting discussion on our thoughts about Shin’s life. Anuraag also participated, and we were able to agree with each other in the end. We were able to share our thoughts and some very interesting points came up, that I hadn’t thought of. I respectfully doubted and questioned some of Saumya’s points, so that she could clarify them, and we could discuss a better and more complete conclusion.

Discussion:

Do you believe in magic?

This blog entry of mine ended in a discussion between Monique and I, where we talk about the word choice in different novels etc. At the end we focused on Shakespeare, since he had a very exquisite writing style that not everyone appreciates. We discussed his use of language and also word choice in general. This little interaction really helped me form my ideas in a distinctive way.

Xenoblogging:

Keep it simple

I was the first to comment on her post ‘Simple vs. Complicated’ and my comment started a discussion between us. Her post was very interesting but I was able to point out some aspects that needed to be clarified. I think that we were able to run an intellectual discussion, and it also helped me expanding my own ideas.

Wildcard:

If I had to talk about my greatest passion (besides eating, sleeping and partying – these are things I wouldn’t give up for the world…), it would be travelling. Not to any random place, but to France or Germany. When I visit my friends and family in Germany and France, I feel at home and that is a feeling that is irreplaceable. In Germany, when I walk through the street that I used to live in for eleven years, when I cross the little mailbox that I used to put my letters for my mailing friend in, when I see the church that I used to sing in and celebrate Christmas in, I get an amazing feeling. It’s like getting butterflies in your stomach when you see the person you like – just different.  Memories are something no one can take from you, (here I could add a little reference to 1984 – memories are the only thing the thought police can’t erase) and they make you happy. Sometimes I wish that you could put memories in marmalade glasses, and that you could open them whenever you wanted to, to relive those memories, to go back in time for a while. Paris was probably the best period of my life so far. I spent my best moments there. I had a group of friends – the four blondes- and I loved them so much. We were very much alike and those four years shaped me like no other. (Another little reference to my blog entry about First the Forests Are we human, or are we dancers? where I said that our environments shape us). This might seem like a random ‘wildcard’ post, but if there’s anything I like to talk about, it’s these two places that I will remember forever.

Nobody loves me, but my mother

The article ‘Born and Raised in a North Korean Gulag’ by Choe Sang-Hun, published in the New York Times on Monday, July 9, 2007 was a shock to me. Having read 1984, a fantasy book, I should have been prepared for this, but I had no idea this kind of world could really exist nowadays. How naïve of me to think that something this terrible couldn’t exist in our modern world. I was aware of the fact that torture, death, murder and child labor existed but that someone or a group of people could create a camp like this where people in there don’t even know that there is an outside world, seems unrealistic. The prisoner that was released was in that camp for over 20 years. In 1984 of course, people have spent their whole life there, under this regime except the elder ones that can remember that it used to be different.

When Shin Dong Hyok describes his life in the camp, it seems like he’s talking about a bad war movie, which has an ending that’s only partly happy. The day someone told him about the life outside the walls of the concentration camp, he starts to dream and wishes to be free. In 1984 Winston develops these same feelings when O’Brian hints at him that there is ‘another place’, and he starts to fight for his freedom to love and to have a life of his own. In camp n.14 as well as in 1984 Oceania, the people are ‘deprived of their ability to have the most basic human feelings, such as love, hatred and even a sense of being sad or mistreated’ (Choe Sang-Hun p.2). As terrible as it sounds, it is probably for the best, because if the people in the camp were to feel love and sadness, their lives would be a simple torture. In these camps the people aren’t treated like humans, but like machines. Each day is repetitive and equally awful. Women have to work from 5a.m. ‘til midnight, I wonder how they survive longer than two weeks. The survivor describes a scene where a girl had been beaten to death for hiding wheat grains in her pocket. What kind of person would do that, and how can someone not be terrified and shocked at that view? I don’t understand how you can be immune to those feelings of disgust and fear, while watching it happen.

In Valley no.2, where Shin Dong Hyok used to go to school, there was a slogan carved into a wooden plaque saying: “Everyone obey the regulations!” We have talked about propaganda in class, and it is common in dictatorial regimes to help the popularity of a party using catching or patriotic slogans. The best examples are the Soviet Union with Stalin and Lenin, Hitler’s rule in Germany and also 1984. In this case, the slogan was put there to remind everyone of the single thing they have to do in the camp: Do what you’re told to do. When he escapes from the camp, he admits that he misses being told what to do. He finds it much simpler than having to make your own decisions, which I can understand to some extent but it baffles me how you could miss being treated like a rat. Dong Hyok watched his mother and his brother die. He sat in the audience when his own mother was hanged, and all he felt was hate. He didn’t love her, he hated her for trying to escape, even though he doesn’t know if it’s true, and he still can’t forgive her. Living in the camp, it never occurred to him that something was unfair or that he wasn’t treated right.

It is amazing how similar life in this concentration camp and life in Oceania are. Orwell’s book was his imagination, his warning about the future, but this article actually describes something that happened. Still today there are concentration camps like this one in many countries that we don’t know of and unless someone lucky and smart enough to escape comes and tells us what’s going on, we might not find out about all of them anytime soon. The thought that there are still people living in these exact conditions, not feeling a thing, not having any emotions, scares me. It’s a good thing that this man could escape even though his friend had to die during the escape, because now the message is out there. Now the authorities can take action and hopefully they already did with success.

You can't handle the truth

The truth. How do we know something is absolutely true? Is there such a thing as truth?

In class we each presented an object or a statement that we thought to be true objectively. How can we know if there are really an infinite number of points in a circle, and how do we know if the cover of a DVD box really displays what the DVD is about? To be honest, there is no real answer. It might or might not be true, depending on how you look at it.

In 1984 the people their truth is manipulated easily because the government makes up and changes the past, the words and the truth every day. The citizens are manipulated in believing everything they’re told, but is their truth the truth? What is true to one person doesn’t have to be true for everyone. If the truth changes everyday then it can’t be an objective truth. That’s why the definitions for words in a dictionary aren’t objectively true. Definitions change and word’s meanings change every day because we give them different meanings. Laws of Physics are relatively true because we can’t prove them wrong anyhow. Then again we base our judgments on our senses, on what we see, hear or feel. And people might sense something different than the others and then the law might be proven wrong to that one person. Also if the person is blindfolded, how do we know something is happening? A good example of that is the law of conservation of momentum of a pendulum. Even if you are blindfolded, the pendulum will not hit you and you can therefore prove to yourself that even though you didn’t see the pendulum swing back and forth, that it didn’t hit you and didn’t swung back higher than before.

Believing something is true gives us security. We feel safe when we don’t have to question everything. When we can believe the cup we’re drinking our coffee out is red, then we feel safer than if we had to wonder if it was green or red. The truth is something that can be manipulated, and therefore there is probably nothing that is true all the time, everywhere and to everyone. It is hard to define truth because truth is what is true to us, but how do we know everyone sees it the same way? We don’t and therefore we can’t define something as being absolutely true. I think that there is an exception though when it comes to actions. To our personal actions. We know what we did, and how we did it. No one can manipulate our actions in the way that we believe them to be not true. Our personal truth is hard to manipulate unless we believe everything we’re said.

Sauver le monde

George Orwell’s article ‘Politics and the English Language’ relates in many ways to his book 1984. It discusses the ‘bad way’ in which the English language is. Orwell explains in many convincing arguments how and why the language we speak gets worse from day to day. He says that ‘language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes’. That’s what he thinks and so he demonstrates how it could be if it wasn’t, in 1984. There they invent the Newspeak that constantly evolves, gets simpler and simpler and forbids the citizens of Oceania to say what they want. Orwell says that our thoughts are foolish. So what if it was forbidden to think the way we do? He imagines the outcome for us in his book, where thoughtcrime exists, and where you have to use doublethink to forget about your emotions and memories.

To avoid humbug and vagueness in words he recommends to:

1.       Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2.       Never use a long words here a short one will do.

3.       If it’s possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4.       Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5.       Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6.       Break any of these rules than say anything barbarous.

When you read through Orwell’s essay, you get the feeling that everything you ever said was nonsense. In his opinion, we use verbal false limbs, pretentious diction (‘scientific words’) and meaningless words. But what happens when we stop using all of these words? Wouldn’t we just turn out to speak another version of Newspeak? I personally think that his resolution is quite pleasing. I’ve always hated complicated words in all languages that I know because all they do is: they give you a hard time. In school we learn how important it is to use sophisticated words. In English class we can’t just come up with our simplest vocabulary when it comes to writing an essay. And in Biology class we have to use scientific and latinized words in order to get a good grade. On the other hand, I agree that people tend to use all these words to sound smarter. Only, the thing is that it isn’t the word that makes them smarter; it’s the fact that no one has a clue what he’s talking about that does.

Politicians often use words to sound more educated. I agree with that, I think that when you look back in our history, you notice that many politicians (especially the ones that ended up causing trouble at some point) use foreign words to sound smarter. If you present these words with a certain passion and some enthusiasm, it’s easy to fool people by making them believe that you’re saying something completely different from what you’re actually saying. And it is a little impressing when someone has la grandeur to express themselves in so many ways that die Verwirrung is massive, isn’t it?

Do you believe in Magic?

When you have to choose a book to read, how to you choose it? By its cover? Its title? Its author? Or is it the topic the story discusses that you’re fond to know more about?

‘The Psychology of the Novel – Thirteen ways of looking at the novel’ inspired these questions that I began to ask myself. The narrator says that “the basic substance of imaginative literature is not reason but emotion, which is expressed not by the denotation of words, nor the grammar of the sentences, but through the connotations and colorations of the words as employed by the author’s style.” When reading a book, it isn’t the word choice that makes me relate to it, even though the word choice is important for a better understanding of the story and the novel itself. It is the emotion that I can relate to, and that I can feel myself while reading the book. That doesn’t mean that if I’m always depressed, I’m going to read sad books because I can relate to it, no! It simply means that the words of the author help me relate to the characters in the novel because I can feel the way they do and understand what they’re going through just because the author has the ability or provoking emotions in me with words.  Fictional books like Twilight by Stephanie Meyer or Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling are hard to relate to in the sense that they’re not at all realistic, but they are easy to relate to in the way that they are written in a way that makes us want to be in the place of the main characters. Millions of people on earth love these books because they describe their personal Utopia with all the magic, the mysteries and the love.

The cover and the title of a novel/book are important to me. When I walk through a bookstore, I won’t stop at the stand with the books that possess a boring cover and an even more boring title. What is even more important though, is the author. When we like a certain author that has qualities of the voice that we appreciate, we are more likely to take his new novel than a novel written by someone that we know writes in a very arrogant or self-obsessed tone, that lets us feel indifferent and does not move us in any way. “The reader perceives and reacts to these qualities instantly, without thinking”.

Some authors of playwrights for example, like Brecht, are trying to do the exact opposite. Brecht, in this case, doesn’t want his audience to relate to the characters and therefore not connect with the emotions the characters are presenting. He was constantly trying to break ‘the forth wall’ by pulling the audience out of their comfort zone. The spectators were supposed to leave the theater thinking and arguing about what they just saw. He wanted them to be mad and shocked about what they had seen. The theater was supposed to go on, even though the play was over. This can also occur in books. Books aren’t supposed to give you the ‘aww-that-was-a-cute-story’ – feeling. Authors are trying to pass a message, to make their readers think about a topic they care about, or something like that. In the “Psychology of the novel” it says also that the point of view of the author or the narrator is like the perspective in a realistic painting – it changes the size and shape, the nature and identity, of characters etc. A novel must have action and point of view, as well as suspense and reflection, because that is the way life is.

Are we human, or are we dancers?

First the Forests




The article ‘First the Forests’ relates in many ways to Zamyantin’s novel We. It talks about the fact that civilization is ‘attacked’ by the forests, just like the One State is attacked by nature. He uses symbols of nature to illustrate his ideas, like the idea that the forest was hiding the sky. This idea ‘explains’ our urge to look at the sky, to go up to heaven once we die and the thought that God might be in the sky waiting for us with all his love. The forest was hiding the sky which immediately puts the forest in a bad position. I thought that this thought related to the fog in the novel We. Once the fog appears, D-503 is sad, destabilized and his world is crumbling down. Also the Integral might have been built because the numbers were curious about what hides in the sky, they could have been curious about the secrets the sky is hiding from them. It is repeatedly said that the forest was there first, that in the beginning there was only dense forest. That links to the ‘ancient’ times in We, where the world is described as being dirty, uncivilized – nature. A thought brought up in our class discussion was that the forest might be due to the big flood, when Noah and the animals were the only ones that survived. Of course this is what is said in the bible, and therefore we cannot rely on that fact scientifically.


The main question that we discussed in our class discussion was: What does it mean to be human? Where is the difference between animals and machines? Some very interesting ideas came up, about the ideas that ‘First the Forests’ contains. The numbers living in the One State are like machines, they don’t have a free will, they do whatever they are told to do by the Benefactor, they don’t rebel themselves and they don’t have free time to do what they want. In ‘First the Forests’ humans are described as animalist creatures, that live in the forest just like every animal would do. They are covered with hair; they even look like animals before they come out of the forest. Also the ‘other humans’ that live outside the One State wall are hairy. In our discussion we thought that the idea of always coming back to where we started is very important in both We and ‘First the Forests’. Life is a cycle. When we’re not born yet, we’re all covered in hair which is like a funny fact because when we grow older and we approach our sixties or seventies, we get hairier. I did not know that and I find it amusing how this thought in ‘First the Forests’ is actually something that can be scientifically proven. Going back to the question “What is human?” we noticed that there is a fine line between being human and being a machine. This comes back to the two articles we previously read in class, about Individuality. It is important for us to keep some kind of individuality in our large society. I thought that the giants mentioned in the article could be like a mix of animal and human, just like I-330 in We. Talking about I-330, she is someone that seems to fit into her society but that really doesn’t. She understands what’s going on, she sees how everyone is turned into machines from the very beginning of their existence and she tries to save the people in the One State. She is also the one that opens D-503’s eyes, just like the Vulcan in ‘First the Forests’ is the one that opens everyone’s eyes and a Vulcan is something very natural.


In conclusion I would agree with the article in some points. I also believe that during our lives we sort of come back to who we used to be, before we were shaped by our environment. Not only physically we shrink after years of growing but we’re also brought back to the same questions we had as we were a child. A quote from a song that I know says ‘and any man who knows a thing knows he knows not a damn damn thing at all’. That seems like a harsh statement but I think that it is true in many ways. We can learn all about physics, geography or mathematics but do we really know anything at all?